The Moonshine Memoranda: #MeToo - "I have been slut-shamed. I have been harassed. I’ve been maligned.”

The following is a pseudonymous contribution by Malleus Maleficus. It contains incendiary language and scenes that some readers may find offensive. If you wish to report libel or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com. To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk

After 20 years of breathless waiting, Rose McGowan’s solitary chance arrived. Grasping the opportunity to die for her integrity she strongly encouraged sexual misconduct victims to speak out and name their attacker. “The paradigm must be

McGowan surrenders....

subverted. It is time. We’ve been waiting a very long time for this to happen but we don’t have to wait anymore,” she said. What actually prevailed upon her to ‘wait’ for so long is not easily apparent, but rumour has it that Harvey Weinstein offered her hush money. Either way, it was a great theatrical performance. She accused the disgraced TWC mogul of raping her, and blasted what she called Hollywood’s culture of fear and sexual misconduct. “I have been silenced for 20 years. I have been slut-shamed. I have been harassed. I’ve been maligned.” A striking feature of this “paradigm of horror” is just how many abuse veterans “who have been grabbed by the motherfucking pussy,” used their battlefield experience to keep shtumm. “No more #WhyWomenDontReport! Name it, shame it and call it out. Join me. It’s time to clean house.”

Less House of Cards, more House of Usher...!

While Rohingya women are raped in their thousands by marauding Burmese soldiers, and the rest of the world is dealing with natural disasters, nuclear alerts, political persecution, gas attacks on children in Syria, the Yazidi genocide, environmental catastrophe, wholesale starvation, Aids and forced migration, the cosmopolitan West is in the grip of a massive sexual #MeToo psychosis. And as an insight into the lynch mob mentality currently gripping Our Sovereign Lord the Media Mob, I am not sure what worries me more, the mass psychotic product they’re pitching or the impending death rattle of the rest of the world.

The lunatic fringe is now the main event - “Police: We found porn on deputy PM’s computers.” This banner ran prominently, without a hint of embarrassment, in the learned THE SUNDAY TIMES. Others, less erudite, merely want a pretext for a

sensational rout. Michael Fallon “lunged” at Jane Merrick and “tried to kiss her” in 2003 (sic), at which she “shrank away in horror and ran off to my office in the press gallery.” So I don’t think she’s got quite the same handle on a crisis as did Marie Colvin on the war in Syria. No, I think the value of cowardice is being repriced. Kevin Spacey could be stripped of the special Olivier award presented to him by the Society of London Theatre, following allegations of sexual assault, roughly at the time when Schwarzenegger was preoccupied with the seduction of his wife's maid. Once you're in trouble, the sharks will circle. The comic actress Rosie O’Donnell tweeted: “u don’t remember the incident – 30 years ago? – f*** u kevin – I hope more men come forward.” The flatfish and the bottom-feeders, no doubt, like the American film-maker Tony Montana? He alleged Spacey grabbed his crotch - perhaps the most shortlived of all sexual encounters - at a bar in Hollywood in 2003.

Then we have the most hilarious accusation ever to challenge the judgment of Downing Street propriety: “A lewd comment!” Eager to be seen as eligible, the Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom, pulled it off. An imaginative satisfaction to all who had a 'finger in it'. Which is why it seems best, for some women, to have very limited access to politics.

Then again, when the situation is vague and presumptions are ambiguous, facts do not easily emerge. The comedian Louis CK voluntarily denounced himself to The Inquisition after “having remembered a pattern of masturbating in front of women who were spending time with him in a professional context,” but without realizing, apparently, “the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves.” Which is, as defined in the psychiatric manual, all part of growing up and being a man and having a dick. One female described the sex she had

“I know what I see. I see men running around
trying to put their dicks into everything,
trying to make something happen,
but it’s women who are the source,
the only power - nature, birth, rebirth!”
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

as “consensual but very violent.” Which is where the issue becomes strictly one of performance. Or how’s this for a coup? Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, was not sodomized, she was traumatized by 'lying, bullying' Weinstein, the standard euphemisms employed by the disillusioned and the disaffected. When Lysette Antony answered her front-door, Harvey Weinstein pushed ‘inside’! After which she met him socially, if infrequently, and accepted expensive gifts. After all, “Harvey Weinstein was the career-changing Kingmaker.” And everyone knew what that meant. Indeed, I would defend her right to receive presents as I would a baby’s prerogative to chew pink nipples, but what is harder to defend is the monastic hair-shirted silence (whose primary object appears to be soothing one's conscience without inhibiting your professional advancement). Labour activist Bex Bailey claims she was

"Nice try - Comrade!"

warned not to report rape at a party event because it could 'damage' her career. Elementary, my dear Bex, elementary. No one would seriously dispute that to be raped is a deeply traumatic experience, but you either catch fish or cut bait. The hypocrisy is so perfect it is almost Bolshevik – extremely committed, exceptionally cruel, totally pitiless and bringing the judicial, as well as the political, “paradigm of horror” to a head. For remember all of these women have the vote! To cap it all, UK Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon had his ass handed to him by radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer for putting his hand on her knee at a dinner - with inscrutable timing - some 15 years ago. Expediency won out. Sir Michael admitted the incident and resigned. But many unproven allegations have been made. Indeed, I make

Julia Hartley-Brewer restraining Sir Michael!

no secret of the fact that Cambridge classicist Mary Beard is my favourite rapee, combining as she does a passion for Roman history with a truly active imagination. She was “raped” in 1978, by an architect she met on the station platform in Milan. He “insisted” on booking her into a shared couchette for her journey south. “He bundled me in, took off my clothes and had sex, before departing to the upper bunk,” the lady remembers, adding helpfully that “I told my story differently depending on who I was talking to.” No sobs, no tears, no traumatizing. She told this story, she says, to make the point that everyone has a different take on narratives of sexual violence:

“Sometimes I would make myself the victim, sometimes I would turn this into the perfect zipless f*** on a night train”.

And there you have it. Someone once said – and he ought to have been better understood – that “nothing really changes in human history, only the methods and the names of those who use them, according to their thinking.” Marcus Aurelius, last of the Good Emperors, has the last word: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective not the truth.”

So let’s cut to the chase:

“It was impossible for me
to have given consent –I was falling over!”

“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” said Mukesh Singh, now appealing his death sentence. And frankly, I'm torn on that one. Rock queen Chrissie Hynde cut straight to the chase: “If you’re wearing something that says “Come and f*** me’, you’d better be good on your feet.” Left unsaid is that “There is no evil between men and women that is not a common evil”. In fact, it may actually be true to suggest that it is to those womanly embodiments, under which she appears as ever a different type to give libidinous expression to the seductive theme of feminine existence – or at least to its indulgent imagination – that belongs the real credit for “men’s inhumanity to women.” Weinstein’s was not particularly welcome behaviour, though I suppose you could argue it might have been rather less unwelcome if Harvey looked more like, say, Daryl Van Horne, and not so much like a “Quasimodo figure with a pockmarked, lopsided face like a melted pineapple.”* Another problem is the huge quantity of pornographic grist fed to human pigs and perverts, not just to give them an enormous erection, but a bona fide clinical addiction. The material on Damian Green’s computer was found to be “lawful but extreme”. And if you click on this, it will also be on yours. As indeed, one should use extreme caution in allocating, in any investigation, the existence or absence of culpabilities such as yours. By definition,

pornography is always extreme. Speaking of which, a culture fixated on moral propriety but in fact fundamentally debauched has retreated into a make-believe world in which – never mind the massive evidence to the contrary – predatory sexual overtures are the province of a small bunch of deviant rapists only. And though I'm not a callous person, that makes me laugh. Surely the point about sex and libido is that, by its very nature, it’s not merely individual, but universal. For my own guess is that many of us, indeed the great majority of men, have Harvey Weinstein's warped brains - just none of his balls. Or as Oscar Wilde once said: “We are all lying in the gutter, only some of us are looking at the stars!” Meanwhile, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, the man put in charge of investigating #MeToo, has resigned after four women accused him of slapping, choking and threatening them during sexual encounters. Ah well, as I was saying...